Monday, May 19, 2008

Remembering Wrong.

I'm not sure what it says about the advertising campaign, or about me, that even as I was looking at various Jim Beam web sites while writing Thursday's post, I remembered the campaign theme wrong. The correct theme is "The Stuff Inside Matters Most," which has been around since 2004, not "It's What's Inside That Counts," as I posted on Thursday.

I suppose I could just have corrected Thursday's post, though some would say that's not in the true spirit of blogging. That doesn't bother me much, I'm not a big fan of unpolished writing, but my mistake got me thinking about how we remember things.

Obviously, "The Stuff Inside Matters Most" is a proprietary way of saying "It's What's Inside That Counts," which is the familiar aphorism. That's what I wrote Thursday. The fact that I conflated the two probably indicates that the campaign is effective, in that I not only understand the two phrases as having the same meaning, my brain actually considers them interchangeable.

When I looked at it again a little while ago, I realized it was wrong and started to look for a recent Jim Beam ad. Naturally, I couldn't find one, so I poked around on the web enough to satisfy myself that the theme has only and always been "the stuff inside," which is now being spun-off into the social media campaign.